Hey everybody,
I recently talked about the new Necromunda campaign that James and I have embarked upon, he with his new Venator gang and me with my trusty Delaque. I say “trusty”, I’ve not played with them a whole lot of course! But they were the first gang I was playing this game with, and I really enjoy the sneakiness of the gang. Especially now they seem to have been toned down a little bit. It seemed like they were too powerful with their tactics cards, back when they came out. I suppose the ability to make the game night-fighting, and all the rest of it, wasn’t fun for a lot of other people…
For the first game, we’d again gone through the depths of the Necromunda library to play Last Stand, which was originally in Gang War 3, I believe. One gang is the attacker (me), and the other is the defender; the defender is deployed in the centre of the battlefield and the attacker can deploy to surround them. The object of the game for the defender is to survive to round seven, whereupon they will automatically win – as the attacker, I have to destroy the defender’s gang, because if there’s even one model on the board at the start of round seven, it’s a loss for me.
I talked about this in the last blog, but I have a full ten-man starting gang, mainly made up of gangers but with a champion and three juves in the mix. Following on from the last campaign, I think the ability for juves to progress fast meant I was looking more at them to get some juicy benefits as we go along. However, it’s the perpetual trade-off, because juves have the worst stat-line.
At any rate, the game resulted in quite the bloodbath on my end, and an overall loss for the Delaque. My specialist with the long rifle was the first casualty, and he suffered a spinal injury to make matters worse! One of my juves has suffered an eye injury, which means his ballistics skill of 5+ is now a 6+, so that’s not the best start! My gang bottled out in round three, and the Venators bottled in round 6, though because we kept forgetting to take cool checks before subsequent activations, this didn’t prove to be too much of a hindrance!
For me, I think my champion with the grav gun has to be the man of the match. He was superb, sneaking round the board to seriously injure three opposing fighters, killing two of them outright. The lowest point had to come where another of my juves, equipped with no lesser weapon than a web pistol, managed to web not only an enemy fighter, but also another ganger (who, in my narrative, was supposed to be helping him out on the field). He led to the loss of that ganger, and was himself taken out shortly afterwards – he actually suffered a critical injury and I didn’t want to try and take him to the doc, so he is my first actual casualty.
My leader, one juve and three gangers are now in recovery though, so my hopes are not high for how the next game is going to go! The one bright spot is that I have 75 credits in my stash, after collecting a bit of income from the rackets I control, and while I only managed to complete one intrigue during the game, the reward for that was to claim an unclaimed racket, so in terms of the campaign I feel like I’m not a million miles behind at the moment. But given that my starting gang for next time will be roughly 450 credits, it does mean I am eligible for some Underdog bonuses!
Underdog rules exist because a Necromunda campaign can get out of hand real quick, as I’ve seen with my Goliath. To help balance things up a bit, there are some rules to help bring things back into something like an equal footing. Almost every scenario that uses tactics cards allows the gang with a lower rating to pick an extra card for every full 100 credits difference between the two gangs, but there are also Underdog tactics cards which are quite powerful in their effects. These can be drawn instead of drawing two regular tactics cards, and are things like additional fighters, additional credits, fighters making a miraculous recovery, and so on. There are even tactics cards that give you bonus credits if your fighters go out of action, referencing the fact you probably have bad luck and you’re most likely going to see some death during the game.
I think these could be very useful to me in the next game, whatever that ends up being, because James has got too many fighters and too many credits already!
spalanz.com 
Not sure if it’s me or something else, but I can’t see your instagram imbeds. It just says “view this post on instagram”….
and of course, 30 seconds later I can see them. Sigh…
Thank goodness for that!! 🤣